Top 35 Virginia Woolf Quotes

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

Language is wine upon the lips.

Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often attachment is scarcely perceptible.

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for friends, and then you do it for money.

What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the lefts move in time to it along the road.

At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever.

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface.


To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

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